Monday, August 22, 2005

Center of it All V

I rented a DVD player at the front desk, and went upstairs to watch the movie. I felt a little queasy as I popped the DVD in the player. I had never purchased porn before, and it had been years since I rented a porno. Gay porn was a totally new experience for me, a line I wasn’t sure I wanted to cross, even as I unraveled the mystery of Yoni Winters.

I went to the windows and opened the blinds. I wanted to make sure the situation was as unsexy as possible. I remember George on Seinfeld saying “It moved” after a man gave him a message, and did not want to find myself thinking the same thing.

I took out the envelope I received from the hospital, figuring it would serve as a distraction from the movie. Anything to keep myself from watching the movie too closely.

But I needn’t have worried.

From the moment I hit play, I was treated to 45 minutes of Yoni Winter’s greatest hits. As I heard his voice, I was taken back to the dorm rooms where he first practiced scenes for this movie.

There are some people destined to be doctors, or lawyers, or attorneys. Yoni was born to make this movie.

There were four or five of us sitting around the dormitory that day. Dinner sucked, and one of our classmates had been kicked out of Yeshiva the week before. Finals were coming up, and there was about an hour before we had to go to night seder. The mood was ripe for an all out yeshiva bitch session, and that’s exactly what started.

We had been going for five or ten minutes, complaining about the food and the rules and the food again when yoni walked in. He listened for a second, heard what was going on, and went off. There was a desk in the room, and he stood next to it, shuckling, and imitating Rabbi Rosenblum having sex. OR as he put it, Shtupping his wife. We were rolling on the floor. He kept working in all of Rabbi Rosenblum’s pet Yiddish phrases, and finished with a loud “Gevaldik.”

We were laughing so hard, we couldn’t breathe, but Yoni wasn’t finished yet. The year before we had learned Kiddushin, and all year long Yoni had imitated Rabbi Green saying Beeah, ya kin be mikadesh her with beeah.

For the first time, Yoni brought the voices of Rabbi Green and Rabbi Rosenblum together, for a frolicking gevaldigah beeah session that ended when Rabbi Rosenblum yelled Gevaldigah, and Rabbi Green said that’s enough Beeah, its time for first seder.

The movie on my TV may have shown animated bunnies and hunters running around and having sex, but the voices were straight from my Yeshiva days. Yoni had cut out a lot of the Yiddish, but everything else was still there, and the voices were dead-on. In one scene, he even had the rabbi end with a boisterous Gevaldigah.I laughed my ass off for 45 minutes, and was sorry to see the movie end. When I wasn’t flashing back to my Yeshiva days, I was picturing Yoni having the time of his life as he preserved those voices for eternity in the movie.

The movie ended, and I looked at the contents from the envelope that I had put on the bed. It was strange to hold a dead guy’s possessions. I had never been the next of kin, and never received a packet like that.

As I looked at the wallet, keys and other assorted odds and ends, I felt like a trespasser. For the first time since arriving in Phoenix, I wondered if I was doing the right thing. Yoni had cut me and everyone else out of his life for a reason; was there any reason to invade the wall he had built around himself.

I thought about taking everything on the bed and throwing it out. I pretty much knew what I needed to know. He was poor. He was probably gay. And he did not have fond memories of his yeshiva days. What more could I find out? I didn’t want to find all the lurid details of his life.

The preceding was a work of fiction. You can find the beginning of this story earlier on this blog.